shots, the performers’ faces re­ semble creamy white pools with eyebrows, nostrils, mustaches and beards floating around in them. The loss of color from Antonio Macasoli’s cinematogra­ phy robs the costumes and Ro­ man locales of all their splendor, making what was probably an attractive production look cut- rate (during the moments when you can even clearly decipher what’s onscreen, that is). The only asset here would appear to be the running time, which is 15m longer than indicated by some reference sources and the tape box itself (the tape actually runs 105m 7s, if one includes all the botched reel changes). Mitchell’s performance aside, it will be impossible to fully judge this film until it resurfaces through a reputable PD label or TV syndication. —JC
BLUE SONNET VOL. 1
1989/94, U.S. Manga Corps [250 W. 57th St., Suite 317, New York, NY 10107, (800) 833-7456] #LISM 1077, HF/S, $29.95, 88m 15s
Blue Sonnet is an all-powerful,
American-made cyborg who infil­ trates Osei High School in Tokyo in the guise of a platinum-haired exchange student named Sonnet Barje. Her assignment: to identify and destroy a powerful, anony­ mous “esper” (ie., telepath) known to her creators as The Red Fang. This superheroine-oriented
anime starts out as a contrived and overly familiar entertainment, influenced by CARRIE and Kudo and Ikegami’s superb manga MAI THE PSYCHIC GIRL, but it gradu­ ally gains a momentum of its own and ventures into some unex­ pected and rewarding terrain. As Sonnet leaves the strict company of her creators, she responds to the warmth and friendliness of her human classmates and be­ gins to question the validity of her
10
quest; at the same time, Lan Komatsuzaki, a popular girl whose accomplishments in sports and academics are quickly eclipsed by Sonnet’s super abilities—ex­ periences her first period at age 18 and, simultaneously, the first blooming of her dormant psychic powers. The value ofthisan/me, based
on a story by Masahiro Shibata and directed byTakeyuki Kanda, is that it uses psychic ability as a metaphor for female empower­ ment and consciousness. The heroine and villainess of this sce­ nario are identified for us at the outset, but as the story unfolds, we (and the characters them­ selves) find these roles mis- assigned, illusions propagated by the men who would control their lives. When we first meet Sonnet’s creator—a Crabby Appleton type named Dr. Merikus—he seems an eccentric genius, but in time he shows his true face as a psy­ chotic tool of a megalomaniacal organization; similarly, though Jin Kirya (Lan’s guardian) is ulti­ mately a benign character, we find it hard not to view his deci­ sion to keep her gifts unknown to her as a kind of psychic female circumcision. The tension of in­ decision and self-discovery that suffuses the plot is more than suspenseful, it is also adolescent in the truest sense. This tape consists of three
half-hour “Missions” (or episodes) and introduces more characters than 1 can describe here; all of them manage to enrich the material to some degree, and establish BLUE SONNET as an unusually promising anime se­ ries. The excellent stereo sound­ track is in the original Japanese, with English translations pre­ sented in readable, white (and shadowed) subtitles. Picture quality is just a notch below first- rate, because we noticed a ten­ dency for the light to bead in
haloes, coronas and other brief luminous effusions. A 45s pre­ view of VOLUME 2 (#ÜSM 1229, 59m 5s) follows Mission 3. Jay Parks is credited with the “En­ glish rewrite.”—TL
CRONOS
1992, Vidmark Entertainment #VM5880, HF/S, NS FI, 91m 17s This acclaimed debut fea­
ture by Mexican writer/director Guillermo del Toro, who has announced his intention to spe­ cialize in fantastic cinema, plays more like a grand, sentimental amalgam of horror film history than the arrival of a unique, new voice. Federico Luppi gives a grand performance as aging an­ tique dealer Jesús Gris, who discovers a strange, ancient­ looking, biomechanical device inside the hollow base of an arch­ angel statuette, which attaches itself to his hand and chest and infuses him with youth and a thirst for blood. The device is being sought by the reclusive, ailing millionaire De la Guardia (Claudio Brook), who owns a user’s manual written by the al­ chemist who created it, without which Jesús is forced to undergo a harrowing transformation that he doesn’t understand, with only his little granddaughter Aurora (Tamara Shanath) to assist him. Equally ignorant of the instru­ ment’s power is De la Guardia’s flunky son Angel (Ron Perlman), a money-hungry thug obsessed with plastic surgery, who is or­ dered to obtain it from Jesús by whatever means necessary. Though set in the near future
of 1997, nearly all of the film’s images relate to the cinematic past—the warm relationship be­ tween the lumbering, putrescent Jesús and his granddaughter recall Karloff and little Maria in FRANKENSTEIN, and the per­ verse sweetness of some scenes
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